Real Southern Women

HIS WORDS LIVE AFTER HIM.

  The late Gen. R. E. Colston went abroad and was long among
the Egyptians after our great war, whereby he had the advantage
of broadening his views; and yet to a Virginia Ladies' Memorial
Association made an address from which the following is taken:

  Those who fall in the arms of victory and success need no
monuments to preserve their memories. The continued existence
and prosperity of their country are sufficient epitaphs, and
their names can never be forgotten. But how shall those be
remembered who failed? It is their enemies who write their
history, painting it with their own colors, distorting it with
their calumnies, their prejudices, and their passions; and it
is this one-sided version of the conquerors that the world at
large accepts as truth, for in history as in the present, vae
victis (woe to the conquered).
  It is true that when we, the actors in the last contest,
shall be sleeping in our graves little will it matter to us
what the world may think of us or our motives. But methinks
that we could hardly rest in peace, even in the tomb, should
our descendants misjudge or condemn us. And yet, is there
impossibility of this? They will be told that their fathers
were oligarchs, aristocrats, slave-drivers, rebels, traitors,
who, to perpetuate the monstrous sin of human slavery, tried
to throttle out the life of the nation and to rend asunder
the government founded by Washington; that they raised
parricidal hands against the sacred ark of the Constitution;
that they were the unprovoked aggressors, and struck the first
sacrilegious "blow against the Union and the flag of their
country.
  What if this be but false cant and calumny? Constant repetition
will give it something of the authority of truth. We cannot
doubt it. Our descendants will see these slanders repeated in
Northern and probably in European publications; perhaps even
in the very text-books of their schools (for, unfortunately,
we Southerners, write too little, and they may be compelled,
like ourselves, to look abroad for their intellectual nutriment).
It is true that our own immediate sons and daughters will not
believe these falsifications of history, but perchance their
children or grandchildren may believe them. And those who are
still our enemies after five years of peace rely confidently
upon this result. A so-called minister of the Prince of Peace,
but whose early and persistent advocacy of war and bloodshed
prove that he obtained his commission from a very opposite
quarter, has dared to say that "in a few years the relatives of
those Southern men who fell in our struggle will be ashamed to
be seen standing by the side of their dishonored graves." And he
who said this, mark you, is no obscure driveler, but, on the
contrary, one of the highest representative men of the North,
one whom they delight to honor--no less a personage than the
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.
  Fellow Southerners, whose teachings and influence can accomplish
more than all other agencies combined to hurl back this foul
slander in the teeth of that reverend liar? Who can best guard our
posterity from the corrupting odium of falsehood? Who can so
implant the right and justice of our lost cause into their souls
as to prevail over all the calumnies of our detractors?
Your hearts reply, like mine: "It is the noble, patriotic,
unwavering women of the South." Yes, let me repeat this last
epithet, for it belongs peculiarly to them, unwavering, true to
the right, true to the South, in the past and in the present, and
they will be in the future. We would be baser than the brutes that
perish could we forget what the women of the South did to promote
the success of our efforts. By night and by day they labored with
diligent hands to supply the deficiencies of the government. They
nursed the sick and wounded, they bore sorrows and privations of
every kind without a murmur. What they suffered no tongue, no pen,
can ever express. Yet they never faltered, they never gave up, and
they continued to cheer the sinking hearts of their defenders and
to hope against all hope, even when an was over. And see how nobly
they have kept us in faith!  While some men who once did gallant
service in the Southern armies have, alas! turned false for filthy
lucre, where are the renegades among Southern women? Even we who
have preserved our faith unstained, have we not grown colder and
more forgetful? Had it depended upon us alone, is there not much
reason to fear that our brothers' bones would still lie unheeded
where they fell? Not that we have grown indifferent or estranged,
but the claims of the living and the anxieties of misfortune have
absorbed our attention. It is these blessed Southern women, whose
tender hearts never forget, that deserve the credit of all that has
been done among us to preserve from destruction the remains of our
brave comrades. Unwearied by all their labors and self-sacrifice
during four years of war, they were, like Mary, the first at the
graves of their beloved dead. Therefore to them we may safely intrust
the holy ark of our Southern faith. Yes, it is for you-wives, mothers,
daughters, of the South-it is for you, far more than for us, to
fashion the hearts and thoughts of our children. We have neither the
time nor the aptitude that you possess for training the infant mind
from the beginning and inclining the twig the way the tree should
grow. You are now, or will be some day, the mothers of future
generations. See that you transmit to them the traditions and memories
of our cause and of our glorious, if unsuccessful, struggle, that
they may in their turn transmit them unchanged to those who succeed
them. And let them learn from you that, although the same inscrutable
Providence that once permitted the Grecian cross to go down before
the Moslem crescent, has decreed that we should yield to Northern
supremacy, and that we should fail in our endeavor; yet, for all
that, we were right.
  It is for you, Southern matrons, to guard your cherished ones against
this foul idolatry, and to teach them a nobler and a higher moral.
It is for you to bring the youth of our land to these consecrated
mounds and to engrave in their candid souls the true story of our
wrongs, our motives, and our deeds. Tell them in tender and eloquent
words that those who lie here entombed were neither traitors nor
rebels, and that those absurd epithets are but the ravings of malignant
folly when applied to men who claimed nothing but their right under
the Constitution of their fathers-the right of self-government. Tell
them how we exhausted every honorable means to avoid the terrible
arbitrament of war, asking only to be let alone, and tendering alliance,
friendship, free navigation- everything reasonable and magnanimous-to
obtain an amicable settlement. Tell them how, when driven to draw the
sword, we fought the mercenaries of all the world until, overpowered
by tenfold numbers, we fell; but, like Leonidas and his Spartans of
old, fell so heroically that our defeat was more glorious than victory.
   Then from so sublime a theme teach our children a no less sublime
lesson. Bid them honor the right, just because it is right; honor it
when its defenders have gained the rich prize of success, honor it
still more when they are languishing in the dungeons of oppression or
lying in bloody graves, like the martyrs we celebrate today. And bid
them remember that no triumph, however brilliant, can ever change the
wrong into the right. Next to their duty to God, teach your offspring
to love their native Southern land all the more tenderly for its
calamities, and to cherish the memories of their fathers all the more
preciously because they battled for the right and went down in the
unequal strife. And should their youthful hearts wonder at the triumph
of force over justice, teach them that the ways of Providence are
mysterious and not like our ways. For a time the wicked may flourish
like a green bay-tree, but he shall not endure forever, and far better
it is to suffer with the righteous than to rejoice with the unjust.
Sooner or later, in some mysterious way that we cannot now perceive-in
their own day, perhaps, if not in ours-the truth of our principles will
be recognized. Meanwhile, bid them scorn "to crook the pregnant hinges
of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning." Yet, while clinging to our
principles and vindicating the righteousness of our motives, let our
children learn also the Christian lesson of forgiveness. God forbid
that the bitterness of our times should be perpetuated from generation
to generation!
   God forbid, above all, that this land should ever be drenched again
with the blood of contending armies speaking the same language and
springing from a kindred race! On the contrary, may he grant that the
causes of strife, being at last all extinct, peace and harmony may
prevail and make this land in truth, and not merely in name, the asylum
of human liberty!